Depressing/racist post du jour

Obama is an example of that peculiar American contribution to the long line of political deviancy: the romantic leftist, a combination of undergrad Marxism, New Deal activism, Great Society idealism, and late ’60s dementia. In fulfillment of this role, he is going down the list of left-wing daydreams, wish-fulfillment fantasies, and unfinished business, and doing his damnedest to see them made reality.

Accomplished so far? Health care “reform”, nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia, and a dismantlement of the manned space program. I guess they’re going to speak Chinese or Indian on the S.S. Enterprise.

On deck?

Cap & trade
Marijuana legalization (tied in with ending the drug war as a whole)
Amnesty for illegals
Cutting Israel loose (we saw the first step toward this last week)
Creation of an international legal system
Media “reform”
A new NRA (National Recovery Act here, playmates — not the gun guys.)
A government-mandated green economy
An equal-outcomes, “multicultural” society

Dunn argues that the exceptions to the left-wing fantasy lists (offshore drilling and the nuclear reactor projects) is merely triangulation.

The reactor projects must still clear the standard regulatory barriers, an unlikely event. The drilling program is almost completely bogus. More exploration fields off of Alaska were closed than opened, along with the entire Pacific Coast and much of the Atlantic.
Obama’s problem is that romantic leftism is consistently disastrous. A brief examination of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, the models for Obama’s efforts, will reveal that clearly. More to the point, the prototypes for his recent triumphs have also failed wherever they have been put into effect. Concerning health care, we’re told that we’ve joined the rest of the civilized world. So here’s what civilization looks like:

In 2008, the Australian health care system came near to meltdown after the New South Wales hospital network collapsed. The money was all spent, vendors stopped supplying medical materials, patients just out of surgery lay screaming on their beds after the morphine and sedatives ran out, and hundreds of specialists and personnel jumped ship for jobs in private medical centers. How did it happen? Nobody knows. Last year, Dr. Anne Doig, the incoming head of Canadian Medicare, stated publicly that the system was nearing implosion. She promised to try to fix it. She did not sound enthusiastic. In the U.K., mother of all national health services, not a week goes by without another series of stories in British papers detailing corruption, incompetence, and sheer cruelty within the NHS. Recent news includes reports that dozens of local hospitals will be closed down as a money-saving measure, leaving many communities with no medical facilities whatsoever. Tens of thousands have died in the hands of the NHS in recent years, and tens if not hundreds of thousands more will die before any meaningful reform occurs. These countries, composing the core of the Anglosphere, are on their way to third-world status as far as their health-care systems are concerned. We just joined them on that slide. As for me, I liked barbarism better.

That is what we are headed for. Of course, that doesn’t even take into account the economic future. Unemployement near 10%; the deficit; new taxes coming down the pike. And the left refuses to face the reality of the situation. Certainly they can tax they’re way out of this, right? Stick it to those RICH folks who DID SO WELL under Bush, right?

Laffer it up. A couple of economists figured out the way to raise the MOST taxes. The good news (for tax lovers) is that we could raise tax rates and bleed more money out of the taxpayers. In fact, they maximize its revenue by raising the rates on labor to 65%!! Yea, our salvation is near.

But wait, I’m not done. Taxes are on labor and capitol. And, apparently the correct “mix” to maximize that revenue is to raise taxes on labor (to 65%) and lower the rates on capital from the current 36% to 22%.

That’s not something tax-lovers want to hear. If they want to buy the “good parts” of this Laffer Curve story, they also need to buy the part that says Warren Buffet and others who don’t “earn” their income should get their tax rates cut by over a third, while those who work for a paycheck should have theirs more than doubled. Sell that to the AFL-CIO.

Now, if I read my Marx correctly, that’s not exactly how it’s supposed to go. The greedy capitalists should be footing the bill. Otherwise, it’s just not fair.

Long story short, if you want to get close to covering the current spending our betters are doing in Washington, you need to DOUBLE the tax rates of wages.